I obtained a proof copy of this spellbinding novel several months ago. It wouldn't be an overstatement to say that I was blown away. I immediately re-read the book, and again found myself full of admiration. When I picked up The People's Act of Love again recently, I thought that with the perspective of distance and little bit of mature reflection, I might be able to lower my sights somewhat. I was wrong. I remain convinced that The People's Act of Love is a truly great novel.

Too often book reviewers will purr over novels that purport to address the "human condition", invariably stressing the work's supposed "life-affirming" qualities. Usually, however, there is no concomitant discussion as to what such terms actually signify. Cultural bias is often operating here. We head off on our summer holidays, briefly liberated from the pressures of work, and con ourselves into believing that our airport-procured read, habitually set in the Mediterranean, fits this "life-affirmation" bill. Lavish descriptions of the landscapes, the flora and fauna, and most of all, the cooking and wine of Provence, Tuscany or the Greek islands customarily tick most of the requisite boxes.

Putting aside our cultural baggage for a minute, it's worthwhile going back to basics and thinking about exactly what our "human condition" is. Humans are unique animals in that we know that we are going to die at some point. The compensation we are given for this knowledge is that we have the capacity to love. We need each other, and have an innate drive towards improving our lives and our community, yet are cursed with a greedy, destructive edge.

In western society we are averse to contemplating our own death, as our prevailing values of individualism and materialism are probably unsustainable if we're forced to regard them in the context of our mortality. Therefore writers who strive to deal with difficult or challenging material are often labeled as anti-life depressives. This, of course, is arrant nonsense. Buddhists contemplate death every day and you will seldom meet a morose one.

The problem for the novelist who aspires to be an artist rather than merely an entertainer, is to try on some level to address this. James Meek does so by raising a powerful question: under what circumstances is eating another human being justifiable? This concept is not debated in an existential manner in the drawing room of an affluent western city. The People's Act of Love is set in the coldest, most isolated part of Siberia in revolutionary Russia, where the question is rendered a stark and immediate dilemma.

The result is a beautifully written novel which, though set in the past, feels like the most contemporary fiction you'll ever read. One of the interesting benefits of opting to go down the historical novel route is that it frees the author from having to address the pop culture and media society that many writers are obsessed with. By sidestepping this, Meek is able to concentrate fully on place, character and storyline. The tale features a renegade Czech army unit ran by a despot named Matula. This garrison is stranded in a community of religious fanatics in a small, remote town in Siberia. Matula has his nemesis in one of his brother officers, Mutz, an uptight but humane and principled Jew, an outsider in his own militia. Matula spares his brother officer none of the prevailing anti-semitism: "Damn you, Jew boy, no wonder the Austrian empire fell apart, taking your kind into its army. The only thing I can't understand is whether your tribe is mentally defective or whether this is part of your conspiracy, like that bunch of Yids waving the red banner in Petrograd."

With comrades like these it's little wonder that Mutz seeks solace in the arms of Anna Petrovna, a beautiful war widow who has her own reasons for staying in this community. Anna's dilemma is rendered palpable by the extreme behaviour of her previous lover and she emerges as the most sympathetic individual in the book. Into this frozen wasteland is cast the enigmatic escaped convict, Samarin.

Samarin is a warped perfectionist, and his chilling, nihilistic rationality almost persuades, even as the maniacal self-defeated nature of it stares one in the face. As an agent of darkness he is more convincing than either Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects or Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter. When he tells Anna about the man who is his supposed foe (but actually himself), he declares: "He's a man so dedicated to the happiness of the future world that he sets himself to destroy all the corrupt and cruel functionaries he can . . . till he's destroyed himself. He's not a destroyer, he is destruction . . . to hold such a man to the same standards as ordinary men would be strange, like putting wolves on trial for killing an elk, or trying to shoot the wind."

You could write page after page on the possible reference points for this incredible novel; it reads like a modern Heart of Darkness, and Coppola's Vietnam remake Apocalypse Now, fused together with the great Russian masters such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. In the end though, The People's Act of Love stands alone as a perfectly realised work, with Meek fulfilling his own great potential as a storyteller, tying in his surreal fiction writing abilities and dark, quirky wit, with his great understanding of Russia. Meek's breadth of humanity and his empathy for Russia, and Ukraine especially, will have impressed those who have followed his award-winning journalism from eastern Europe, in both this newspaper and the Scotsman.

Meek has the ability to project horror and beauty as parallel lines of the same track, as when one character recalls his own castration as a religious rite: "The four men kneeled in front of me and began to pray. At intervals I was given responses to make. One of the apprentices held my arms behind my back; the other two held the ankles of my open legs. Chanov bent over me, lifted my member with his left hand and brought the knife down quickly with the other. In that one moment it seemed that God turned his face away and the fear smothered the joy."

The silly but persistent notion that the novel is dead, or that modern fiction cannot tell us anything startling and thought-provoking about our humanity or the world we live in, is repeatedly debunked by this book. The People's Act of Love has a timeless quality; it will be read, referenced, studied and talked about for years to come.